Caged
by Kgirl1
Summary: Oneshot, Summary inside.


**A/N: This is pretty short. The idea just kind of struck me. I might consider doing a prequel later on, we'll just see. Let me know what you think. **

**(Oh, and can I just say that the new font/format of the site bothers me. That's all.)**

**Caged.**

She was going again.

Sherman always begged her not to, but she was going again.

She didn't mean to disobey him. She just couldn't stay away. After all, he wasn't in charge. Or was he? It was all so jumbled now.

Down, down, down the steps. The elevator didn't even reach this far into the depths of the Hub.

Down, down, down further, her feet padding softly on the Sentient material. This bottom floor was mostly for storage: the Cortez's artifact collection, Sage's works-in-progress.

Him.

It.

Their darkest and deepest secret, hidden away, out of sight, out of mind. Trying to cover up its condition, trying to bury their guilt.

It didn't work. At least, not for her.

Because no matter how many stairs she had to descend, no matter how many boxes were stacked, no matter how little they spoke of it, it would always, always be there.

In the metal cage, ten feet high, twelve wide and long. The steel bars marked with scratches and dented with the rage of a beast that has been confined too long. The security cameras, always watching, and the motion sensors to ensure that the creature never left its prison.

It hated the cage. Oh, how it loathed the cage, with its industrial bars and grates, the confines that kept it from escaping and tearing apart anything in its path that tried to stop it. It was not human, but it was human enough for Agura to understand this much, and so no matter how much it hurt, no matter what she felt or what it did or how much it looked like him, she had to force herself to never, ever, open the cage.

After all, that was what had almost gotten her banned from coming down those steps ever again in the first place.

It was Tezz who had stopped her, just moments before she was about to pull the hatch. She had been so convinced that she could bring him back, somehow fix him. The alarms had blared as her fingertips rested on the handle, and the beast looked at her with such a look in its eyes, one that was not so murderous but instead dead and hopeless, and she hated to see any living creature, especially one that she had once so loved, trapped in such a cage.

The Russian had yanked her back and to the ground before she had had the chance to find out what would have happened, if she would have been able to fix him. He had been too infuriated to remember his English for three full minutes. Agura remembered. The yelling was hard to forget. Her teammates running down and staring at her with that horrible combination of disappointment and pity in their eyes was hard to forget.

Everything was hard to forget, but forgetting would have made everything so much easier.

Nothing was easy now. Just coming down those steps took an enormous amount of mental effort. Because it was down here, and no matter what she did, it was not changing any time soon.

She stared at it. She had seen it so many times that you would think she'd had enough of its miserable hideousness, but she was never able to tear her eyes away. The creature was massive and hulking, its shoulders hunched over and rounded knuckles dragging down on ungainly arms. Its legs were short compared to its trunk-like torso, and carried it around the enclosure in squatting motions. At first glance, it could have been a Vandal, like Grimian. An ape. But when you looked closer, when you saw the thing for what it truly was and knew in your heart that it was your fault, it was not a mere Vandal.

It was a hybrid. A human creature, infected with Vandal DNA and overpowered by its brutality. Maybe that was why it was so revolting to her; two bodies slammed together without a proper layout. It was a Frankenstein. A freak.

There were slight human remainders if you looked closely enough: the legs, long by Vandal standards but squat by human measure, the coloring that was lighter than Grimian's shadowy fur, and in its face. A less prominent nose and chin, the structure more delicate than rough, but still amalgamated with the harsh, jutting structure of a Vandal that resulted in an unforgivable combination, a mutation gone horribly wrong. It was ugly. She hated to say it, to even have the thought cross her mind, but the thing was unforgivably ugly.

The worst part was the eyes. They were not ugly, and that was what made them so painful to look into. They were the most human part about the thing, startling mortal. The beast was revolting and pitiable to look at but the eyes physically pained her to stare into.

They were pools of agony, hurt and aching, a never-ending expression of the misunderstanding and confliction it would always feel. Sometimes there was rage in them, sometimes sorrow. Agura had come to think that its two sides fought in those eyes: the Vandal and human.

He had to know he was ugly. The human in him must have hated himself. The Vandal probably hated the human. And the only time she had ever seen those eyes seem to agree on something was when she had come so close to opening its cage, the first week they had brought it to the Hub. There had been desperation, sorrow, but most of all a steely determination.

It was what had reminded her of him, made her think she could fix whatever it was had broken.

It hadn't worked. Sherman and Tezz had been working on cures ever since bringing him back, and nothing worked.

_Nothing_.

Agura took a step closer to the cage, until she could almost reach out and touch the bars. The creature had turned to face her the second she had descended those stairs, its sense of hearing unmatched. She hadn't been able to meet its eyes until now, and finally forced herself to look up.

The blue, hollow pools stung her heart. He looked so desolate, hunched there in the cage, staring at her not so much in hatred but because she was the one link it had left to humanity. Its eyes begged her for something, for freedom, for assurance.

She swallowed the lump in her throat.

"We'll turn you back, Vert."

_It's a lie. We've tried everything. I don't know what to do anymore._

And so, foolishly, she gave him her word.

"I promise."


End file.
